Advice to a blogging artist

Last year Dean Melbourne was on the Metapod course run for self employed creative types who, due to their spending all their time being creative, hadn’t got the business skills needed to be self employed. I did a talk on using blogs and the social internet generally as part of their marketing strategy and Dean was inspired to start a blog.

After a false start he’s giving it another go and emailed for some advice since he felt out of his comfort zone, a natural reaction since his chosen medium isn’t blogging, and here’s what I suggested.

• Remember that while what you do might seem mundane, it’s fascinating to anyone who can’t do what you do. I read comics but can’t draw so watching cartoonists draw and doodle is like magic to me.
• Keep your posts short. A paragraph or two at most.
• Include images. When you finish a painting pop up a photo of it with a brief commentary.
• Document your process. Take photos of a piece as you’re working on it. A local example of this is Phil Wilkinson’s Artfall blog where he blogs the progress of one of his prints. Another that comes to mind is Coop’s Paintblogging experiment.
• Link to your contemporaries, influences and friends. A simple post with one of their pieces, a link to their site and a paragraph on what you like about their work. As long as you credit them and link back there shouldn’t be a copyright issue and you’ll be helping them out with promotion and search engine ranking.
• I don’t know how you get inspiration for your work but say, for the sake of argument, you go off on specific walks around areas making sketches, talk about this and post up a couple of sketches. Give some background to where you’re work comes from.

I wrote that before finding Dean’s blog so it was nice to see he’s already on the right track.

Painting shown is “Maybelene” by Dean Melbourne.